Cees Nooteboom – författare

»Cees Nooteboom hör till de stora vågbrytarna inom den europeiska litteraturen.« GUNDER ANDERSSON, AFTONBLADET»Nooteboom är en författare med stora teman, men han är aldrig tungläst. Han bäddar in filosofi i vardagsbetraktelser, plötsligt framträder idéerna, oväntat, hisnande, som änglar gömda i övergivna skåp.« | THE WASHINGTON POST»Att läsa Cees Nooteboom är som att komma i samspråk med en äldre excentriker på ett kafé på kontinenten. Man studsar till ibland och förstår inte allt, men det gör ingenting. Den buttra charmen vinner över allt. Man har roligt nästan hela tiden.« | NILS FORSBERG, EXPRESSENFörfattaren. Och så den andre författaren. Den senare formligen spottar ur sig böcker och har inte mycket till övers för den förstes pretentiösa skrivvåndor. Under deras samtal formar sig inte desto mindre en berättelse i den förstes huvud. Om en bulgarisk överste, en bulgarisk läkare och dennes fru, Laura, som ingår en bisarr kärlekstriangel i Rom. Dit har de rest för att läkaren önskat undervisa sin vän översten i den »enda kultur som finns«, den latinska, »ljusets kultur«.Liksom flera av Cees Nootebooms romaner är En sång om sken och vara en kritik av den europeiska kulturen och siktar in sig mot dess hjärta: förhållandet mellan fiktion och verklighet. Om ideal och tillkortakommanden, musor och vrångbilder. Bokens egentliga huvudpersoner är berättaren, som förblir osynlig bakom bokens tjugofyra vackra och distinkta kapitel, och läsaren, som yrvaket upptäcker sig själv allteftersom. I svensk översättning av Per Holmer.CEES NOOTEBOOM, född 1933 i Haag, är en nederländsk författare, mest känd för sina romaner och reseskildringar. Han finns översatt till ett trettiotal språk och har sedan många år nämnts bland kandidaterna till Nobelpriset.»Cees Nooteboom står sig som en lika värdig som oefterhärmlig röst bland samtida författare.« | THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW»Cees Nooteboom speglar vårt behov av sagor samtidigt som han gestaltar den misslyckade myten, vår eviga jakt på det förflutnas förlorade skönhet. Att läsa hans romaner är att ge sig ut på resa mot verkligheten längs diktens avvägar.« | ANN LINGEBRANDT, HELSINGBORGS DAGBLAD

»Cees Nooteboom hör till de stora vågbrytarna inom den europeiska litteraturen.« | GUNDER ANDERSSON, AFTONBLADETKai och Lucia uppträder som illusionister vid en cirkus. Om de bara levde i en tid som visste att uppskatta deras konst! De har tvingats till den vilda Södern där det ännu finns teatrar när Kai känner något i sitt öga, vasst som en glasskärva. Plötsligt är vi mitt uppe i en kalejdoskopisk återgivning av H. C. Andersens klassiska saga Snödrottningen.Det är en besvärjelse av språkets och ideologiers makt som Cees Nooteboom låter utspela sig I de nederländska bergen; ett land som inte finns och som just därför finns desto mer.I översättning av Signe Zeilich-Jensen och med ett nyskrivet förord av kritikern Henrik Petersen.Holländske CEES NOOTEBOOM [f. 1933] debuterade 1953 med romanen Philip och de andra. Sedan dess har han skrivit närmare sextio böcker; förutom romaner och poesi ett stort antal reseskildringar. För romanen I de nederländska bergen tilldelades han 1985 det nederländska Multatuli-priset. Sedan många år har Cees Nooteboom omnämnts som en självklar Nobelpriskandidat.»Att läsa Cees Nooteboom är som att komma i samspråk med en äldre excentriker på ett kafé på kontinenten. Man studsar till ibland och förstår inte allt, men det gör ingenting. Den buttra charmen vinner över allt. Man har roligt nästan hela tiden.« | NILS FORSBERG, EXPRESSEN»Cees Nooteboom speglar vårt behov av sagor samtidigt som han gestaltar den misslyckade myten, vår eviga jakt på det förflutnas förlorade skönhet. Att läsa hans romaner är att ge sig ut på resa mot verkligheten längs diktens avvägar.« | ANN LINGEBRANDT, HELSINGBORGS DAGBLAD»Med ett språk som i sig är en njutning och med detaljrika iakttagelser, på pricken-konkreta mitt i tankeleken, drar Cees Nooteboom in läsaren i en sorts stillastående läsart där varje boksida är sin egen.« | JENNY ASCHENBRENNER, KULTURNYTT, SVERIGES RADIO»Cees Nooteboom står sig som en lika värdig som oefterhärmlig röst bland samtida författare.« | THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Från den nederländske författaren Cees Nootebooms penna har en lång rad romaner, diktsamlingar och rese­ skildringar strömmat, varav flera översatts till svenska. Men hans verk rymmer även rikligt med essäistiska texter. I Varmt hjärta, kylig blick presenteras dessa för första gången i svensk översättning, i ett urval som spänner över nästan 40 års tid och över en rik uppsätt­ning ämnen: konst, resor, språk, film, litteratur...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELLOne morning Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where twenty years previously he slept with another man’s wife. Yet he is quite certain that the night before he went to sleep as normal in his house in Amsterdam. And so Herman begins a physical journey and a metaphysical adventure, which will re-route him via past loves, through the pangs and pleasures of memory, and to the very heart of that crucial question: ‘who am I?’.

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people with its exoticism and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the "typical Japanese." The plan works better than either had imagined in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan as often as possible over the next five years. A reunion is planned: the three will meet again at Mount Fuji. Time, it seems, has stood still ...except the woman has a secret, and plans of her own. This moving novel of obsession and difference is the latest masterwork from one of the greatest European writers working today, redolent with the power of desire and alive to the limits of our understanding of others.

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel The Following Story,is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. Self-Portrait of an Other is one of the most unique and innovative works in his oeuvre. Written in response to and published together with a series of drawings by the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann, the book draws on Nooteboom's personal reflections--his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories and nightmares--and presents a set of prose poems that complements and echoes Neumann's work. Full of striking scenes and disturbing images, the poems, driven by the logic of dreams, create the self-portrait of the title.

Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk's Eye on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems--which can be read individually or, all together, as the record of a poet's life--are about the two islands. But they're also about islands as an archetype, about the serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea sweeping imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini Banerjee's collages, the poems in this volume are rich in allusion; they address the past, memories, illusions, dreams, and the heart of all poetry--which Nooteboom locates in the opening line of Plato's Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks, "My dear Phaedrus, whence came you, and whither are you going?"

"A lyrical 'book of days' . . . A bejewelled mosaic" Financial Times"Humane, insightful and deeply cultured" Times Literary SupplementThough a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, "the island of the wind", and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but "a book of days", with observations about what is immediately around him, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world, on life and death, on literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast horizons: the Divine Comedy and the books it generated, the contempt of Borges for Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless flight of the Voyagers, the repetition of history as a tragedy, but never as farce. 533 is a meditative rhapsody that would like to exclude the noise of current events, yet must return to them several times, and sceptically contemplates the threat of a disintegrating Europe. Reading this book is like having an extraordinary conversation with an extraordinary mind."The very first pages are so powerful that you suspect the author must have binned the preceding pages that were needed to climb to such heights" De Volkskrant"The 533 days captivate in their undisguised openness to the world" Süddeutsche ZeitungPhotographs by Simone Sassen * Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

"An outstanding addition to an impressive oeuvre" Times Literary SupplementArthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, wanders the streets of Berlin, a city whose recent past provides the perfect backdrop for his reflections on life and the universe as he collects images for his latest project - a film that will show the world through his eyes.With his circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Daane discusses everything from history to metaphysics and the meaning of our contemporary existence, often over a hearty meal. Then, one cold winter's day, Daane meets the history student Elik Oranje and his world is turned upside down. And when she unexpectedly leaves the city for Spain, Daane is compelled to follow.All Souls' Day is an elegiac love story, a poignant and affecting tale in which the city of Berlin plays a prominent role, by one of Europe's major contemporary writers.Translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty"Displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind" Kirkus Reviews"One of the most remarkable writers of our time" ALBERTO MANGUEL

In Rituals, Amsterdam of the fifties, sixties and seventies is viewed from the perspective of the capricious Inni Wintrop. An unintentional suicide survivor, the unexpected gift of life returned lends him the curiousity, and impartiality, to survey others' lives and rountines. Inni's opposite, the one-eyed downhill skier Arnold Taads measures his life by the clock, while his disowned son Philip follows Japanese rituals which themselves seem to render his existence meaningless. A novel for those who seek to unravel our mysterious, apparently directionless lives...

A morose provincial inspector of roads in Aragon settles down to write the fable of the Snow Queen. The Netherlands has now been stretched into a vast country with Northern flatlands and hazardous Alpine ranges in the south. Kai and Lucia are circus illusionists, and when Kai is kidnapped, Lucia must rescue him from the Snow Queen's palace. In the Dutch Mountains is an elegantly constructed story within a story, laced with the wit that characterises the work of this outstanding European writer.

A collection of poems, selected by Nooteboom himself from more than a dozen Dutch books.Cees Nooteboom is best known in the English-speaking world for his acclaimed novels, essays, and travel writing; however, Nooteboom has always seen himself first and foremost as a poet. He has said, “without poetry my life would be unthinkable.”The poems in Light Everywhere are presented in reverse chronological order, reflecting the poet’s contemporary perspective on the productivity of more than half a century. The anthology covers his poetic output up to 2013, with an emphasis on his more recent work. New translations of older poems are crafted by award-winning translator David Colmer, lending a consistent voice to the whole collection.When Nooteboom began writing poetry in the Netherlands in 1956, he was considered an outcast for not abiding by the conventional experimental style popular at the time. Instead, he took to learning from poets abroad, translating work by Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, and Pablo Neruda. Nooteboom’s work is lucid and mysterious, evocative and elusive, and it is fitting that the collection begins and ends with poems of travel, moving back in time from an elderly man’s entanglement and resignation to the detachment and harsh light of youth, with everything in between.

Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification. Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe, steeped in Romanticism and mythology, and to Germany's baroque cities. With an outsider's objectivity he has crafted an intimate portrait of the country to its present day.

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come at Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.

A many-tangented pilgrimage through ten centuries of Spain's history, its politics, its art, literature and architecture, its climate and its people, in which Nooteboom unlocks doors to an undiscovered Spain and reveals his obsession for a country he has come to know intimately over the course of forty years.

'What you see at that moment always remains unknown. I know where I am and I know what this place is called, but does that help? If I were to defy the rules and continue along Dampier Downs Road, I would probably die of thirst. I realise that such temptation is no doubt hard for other people to imagine. But I have always felt that way. There is a bend in the road, and of course you have to go up to the bend to see what is around the corner.'Invited to the Perth Literary Festival in 2000, Nooteboom visited Australia for the first time and fell in love with the country and its people, choosing to stay and live for a year.The essays in this hymn to the continent begin with the author's visit to Broome in the northwest of Australia. Weaving the occasion of his arrival in this remote town with his exploration of its history at the heart of the pearl fishing industry more than a century ago and its moment, centre stage, during World War Two, Nooteboom splices the details of time – names, places, stories and heroes – to create what he calls a 'scratch on the map. That is all I have ever done.'Roads to the South is the extraordinary and delicate cicatrice on the country's literary landscape.